“Sometimes we do not want to avoid the Void. When someone gives us flowers, it’s nice to have an empty vase. Finding an empty train carriage is a stroke of luck; an empty motorway is almost a miracle. Making the first pen strokes in an empty notebook or the first steps in an empty new house are sources of pure delight.”
-Louise van Swaaij & Jean Klare,‘The Atlas Of Experience’
For a void is not nothing! Even if a void is a scary prospect, it is also the realm of the infinite possible.
Presented for your viewing pleasure: one well-used blue leatherette and fake suede easy chair in a corner of my Thursday workplace, draped with a marvellously technicolor crochet rug, with a hot pink stuffed toy as an armrest accoutrement. Beautiful!
It invites a damn good sit down. A quiet nap perhaps.
Nothing wrong with a bit of comfort.
Getting too comfortable is another thing altogether.
It doesn’t pay to regret the past – it is what it is, and not a lot to be done about it – but I can definitely think of times when I got way too comfortable in certain life situations, overstayed in one place or missed other opportunities that were begging. Even finding some strange comfort in the known surrounds of adverse and damaging circumstances, when the sensible thing to do would have been to run (not walk) away!
I’m not advocating a bed of nails instead of an easy chair in your corner – no one likes a masochist (sadists aside) -but just to seek that challenging edge that will ignite your soul and mind.
As they say, you snooze, you lose!
A magical sphere comprised of silver ferns hangs suspended in the Wellington sky.
Okay, not really magical in the conjuring sense, as the wires holding the sculpture aloft are clearly visible, but in the sense of fantastical art/sculpture.
That the silver fern is the national symbol of New Zealand/Aotearoa is an emblematic plus.
The whirl of symmetrical fern motifs reflects the sun.
And reflects our special place and the endless,unifying cycle of life here(well, to me it does but you might see something else…).
F**k, I didn’t plan to come over all patriotic at the start of writing this, but even if you’re not a Kiwi, I hope you enjoy this very cool lump of flying metal anyway!
I took a photo at dusk from the harbour wall at Pittenweem on my recent visit to the Scottish village.
The weather outside the harbour was getting rough, with the wind and the sea up, and the rain beginning to fall again.
But looking back to the town, things appeared calmer.
The saying “safe harbour” sprang to mind.
I could see the light of the place we were staying (at centre top) and headed back to its comfort.
(In the failing light the photo was a technical failure so I salvaged it (like a sunken ship!) and made this abstract picture, that captures for me the moment).
The view up to a stunning vaulted ceiling in England’s York Minster.
Justifiably lauded for its architecture, it was the complex symmetry of it all that left me dazzled.
Like this segmented design ,radiating out from the centre of the ceiling like a star, or a flower, then falling down smoothly to enfold the equally beautiful arched windows.
I am a bit of a sucker for symmetry, as some pictures elsewhere on this blog will attest.
As a religious house it is well nigh perfect.
But, there was the nagging thought in my mind that it was a grand, and failed, attempt – it was made by imperfect humans after all ! – to capture a universal spirituality that is at times:
unpredictable,
jagged,
asymmetrical,
not compartmentalised,
indefinable…
Don’t just polish your halo, fluoro it up!
An opening in the leaves and branches, looking down to an estuarine shore.
Sometimes an opening is all you need; sometimes you have to have openness just to see it.
May you have both!
What does failure look like?…feel like?
Like the shore with the tide receded and just not coming back in.
Like a tree stripped of leaves, branches twisted over into loops.
For failure can be a cycle, a seemingly endless loop.
And when you are in that loop, you feel so, so, stuck.
The harder you try, the worse it all seems to get.
The loop becomes a tightening noose.
All you do is hope and pray for anything that will act as a circuit breaker.
And when you find it, or the universe brings the tide back in, that will be success.
Remember then what failure looks and feels like, and appreciate that success.
Because you can’t truly know success without having experienced failure.
” Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”
“Well, now that we have seen each other”, said the unicorn,”if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you”.
-Lewis Carroll , ‘Through The Looking Glass’
I was intrigued by this suit of armour at the Tower of London when I visited there in October.
Shiny, superbly crafted and protective to the nth degree…lots to admire then.
But…
“When we have built up armour against all the bad things we think might happen in the world, we have a false sense of protection and have only built up isolation”. -Tara Stiles
You name it – defensiveness, cynicism, aloofness – they only will only leave you alone in your corner in the end.
And those eye slits are not the best way to view the wonder and possibilities of the world!
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”
– Confucius
( or,an ebb tide will give way to a flood…)
All my life I have had fascination with maps and cartography (the mapmaker’s art). I have a geography degree that hasn’t earned me a cent, but I don’t care.
As a child, I would pore over atlases and maps with their linear representations of different parts of the world – seas, mountains, rivers ,deserts, towns and cities.
I would get lost in those pages and charts, but a good lost, y’know ?
I took this photo of an old map on my recent travels in Scotland. It depicts Fife and its coastline. Heights in feet, depths in fathoms, as it was, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Look closer.
It’s really a guide to the lost and endangered, or maybe a series of warnings to prevent yourself getting in those predicaments in the first place.
Beacons, lights, storm signals and lifeboats(!) and their locations.
Because (and I say this from harsh experience),when you are truly lost (the bad lost), you need external direction and you must heed the signals that you receive from around you.
You might have a moral compass, but you ,alone, cannot be your own map…
Four aerial root formations dangle from the branches of an ancient Pohutukawa tree.
Like woody stalagtites.
And like the beards of old wise men.
Wisdom.
The final request of The Serenity Prayer
The hardest thing to find, and when I really don’t have a clue, this favourite tree reminds me that it may come eventually…
If sitting a atop this pointy, gothic fence would not be a particularly comfortable proposition, neither is it when we do so in a metaphysical sense.
There is pain in procrastination; injury in indecision.
Doing neither one thing nor the other is often more tortuous than the perceived risk of doing something new or different, so you may as well jump (if I may be so pointed)…
“And since you know you cannot see yourself, so well as by reflection, I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of”
-William Shakespeare
ebb then flood 